NYT biz desk names enterprise editor, international editor

New York Times business editor Dean Murphy sent out the following staff announcement by email on Tuesday:

I am pleased to announce that two of BizDay’s finest editors will be assuming key editing jobs — Dave Gillen as our enterprise chief and Damon Darlin as international business editor.

Read about their new responsibilities here.

Best,

Dean

……

Dave Gillen

You’ve seen him on TimesCast, the natty VJ with the Calvin Klein suits, quick wit and unruffled presence. You’ve been treated the past two years to his eye for narrative journalism in Sunday Business. And during the dark days of the financial meltdown, he’s the wordsmith who made reams of deadline copy about stuff like collateralized debt obligations read like poetry (OK, at least like the queen’s English).

Dave Gillen — video guy, idea guy, story guy, word guy and finance guy — is BizDay’s jack-of-all-trades. He will now ply his trades across the entire department as deputy business editor for thinking/doing big.

Dave will oversee projects and major enterprise, an ideal convergence of his experience covering finance, business and economics, and editing long-form journalism both at Sunday Business and (in a previous life) Bloomberg Markets magazine. He will also devote particular attention to encouraging collaboration and cross-pollination among our many pods. When a great idea needs reporters with different backgrounds and beats, he will make sure they find each other. When a barrier needs to come down, he will go to his tool kit and make it happen. When a small idea needs some brain power to become a big idea, Dave will bring the geniuses into the same room.

His ambitions will be lofty — front page and home page, for starters — but he will also be focused on our most precious real estate: the BizDay dress page and online section front. He will help ensure we consistently have blockbuster centerpieces that are not only engaging tales but grab the reader with eye-popping visuals and imaginative multimedia.

The mantra moving forward: The sky’s the limit. Everything’s possible.

Dave is one cool editor, and not just because he plays tenor sax and does good video. In the heat of deadline, or some big breaking story, he is the one calmly tapping away at his keyboard — something he demonstrated early and often when he joined the Times from Bloomberg as finance editor during the onset of the financial crisis in 2007. He helped shape our coverage that was a Pulitzer finalist for Public Service.

Dave moved to Sunday Business in 2011, where David Segal said the flag would now be flying at half-staff (if only Sunday Business had one) mourning his departure. “The guy has everything you want in an editor, including enthusiasm, smarts, warmth, patience, superb story ideas and great hands,” David says. “ He is also is totally unflappable, and believe me, we tried our best to flap him.”

Not to worry. Dave will be moving just a few yards away to Larry’s old desk. He starts immediately.

….

Damon Darlin

Damon Darlin has left such a big imprint on our technology coverage that it easy to forget that he has had many other journalistic lives (think cats — it will become clearer as you read on). His new job as international business editor draws on years of editing experience — at The Times and multiple magazines — and as a reporter in Seoul and Tokyo for The Wall Street Journal.

His new role on BizDay has never been more vital as we become increasingly integrated with the IHT in Paris and Hong Kong, more of our coverage carries global dimensions, and our readership continues to grow beyond our borders. Damon will oversee BizDay correspondents in Europe and Asia, coordinating closely with Tim Race at the IHT, and will also work with beat reporters — including those in tech — in New York and San Francisco to conceive stories with an international reach. He will place a high priority on the Web, making sure our stories from abroad get the kind of graphics and multimedia attention they deserve. And he will take ownership of the international coverage in our daily report, landing Page 1 and home page stories, making narrow stories speak to a broader audience and generally placing international events in context for our readers.

Damon is one of those Energizer journalists whose talent and energy are boundless. The tech team he assembled is a testament to his dedication and leadership. He expanded the reporting staff, helped start Bits, one of the most popular blogs at the Times, and has kept our competitors running in circles.

How does he do it? Steve Lohr, the dean of our tech team, describes Damon as a “genial taskmaster” who gets the most out of his staff by being “smart, steady, tireless and quirky.”

“Damon has an intellect that goes both high and low, from the economics of technology to the fine points of the latest iPhone app — and well beyond tech, from international affairs to Korean cuisine,” Steve says.

And there is more. Before there was Ron Lieber, there was Damon — the first “Your Money” columnist extraordinaire. Damon came to The Times in 2005 to start the column, an instant reader favorite. And when he is not working, Damon cooks a lot — by his own description, “mostly weird ethnic stuff with offal” — and tries to figure out the minds of cats (yes, cats; they’re an obsession), which he hopes may someday turn into a book.

“We all forgave him his inexplicable fascination with Web sites about cats,” Steve Lohr explains. “We all have our eccentricities.”

Damon will be moving to New York from the San Francisco Bay Area this spring. He will take up his new role after handing off his tech responsibilities to Glenn Kramon.

Chris Roush is the Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.